Equity Finance » Receipts

Beginners Guide to Money Management

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 14:18:35 +0000

Managing money is a subject that all of us have had experience with in our lives, and a subject most of us have had to worry about as well. We’ve all either been in personal debt or know someone close to us who is. The 20th and 21st centuries have taught us to be consumers and the skills of the marketing gurus out there that have made us want things that we don’t really need.

The Habit!

We are creatures of habit, if we take on activities we do not normally do it can feel weird and unnatural, but as with any task we’ve had to learn, once we’ve done it a few times it becomes natural and easy. Breaking and making habits is hard psychologically, but I’m going to give you a little known secret to make creating any sort of habits easy.

** To make a habit, you only need to do something the same way 16 to 21 times, and then it will be set in your mind and become natural. ***

If you do something ONCE a day for 3 weeks, you will then do it naturally, doesn’t sound so hard does it?

Money Management – The Paper Way

Whilst we are in the technology age, some people still prefer to work with pen, paper, elbow greece and a filing cabinet, and I don’t blame them, in some cases it can be safer and easier to manage.

1) GET A RECEIPT

The biggest trick to making this work is to get into the habit of grabbing a receipt for every purchase that you ever make, even if you just discard the receipts when you get home for the first while, just make sure you get a copy.

A trick to making this easier to remember and habitual is to put an unused receipt over your Credit/Debit cards and money so before you remove them to make a purchase you are reminded to ask for a receipt.

2) GET A DIARY

No, I don’t want you to start writing down your feelings like you’re a teen again, for every purchase you make write down the purchase amount and the item/vendor it was purchased from. It is recommended that you only start doing this once getting a receipt is habitual.

3) BUY A SCRAP PAD

Once you’ve mastered the two steps above, I want you to start categorising your purchases (food, entertainment), and work out how much you spend on each category per month. This will shock you how much money you “waste” needlessly.

Money Management – The Electronic Way

1) MAKE ALL PURCHASES ON A CREDIT CARD

The biggest problem that I faced with financial management using this method is loose change! When you keep buying small purchases with cash often you won’t get a receipt, won’t remember and won’t have a record of the purchase. THESE ADD UP! You often will have a large gap in your finances because you simple don’t know where your money has gone due to small cash purchases. Make sure ALL payments are done on a Credit Card so when you finally do get your statement you know exactly HOW you’ve used your money.

2) RECORD PURCHASES

In order to truly understand how to manage your money you need to record all of your purchases and understand any trends in your spending you can potentially eliminate. The best program I can recommend is QuickBooks, which is a free to use relatively easy accounting program. It allows you to input all of your purchases into categories and run reports of where your money is being spent.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article and I hope you enjoyed the content, before I go I’m going to leave you with a little tip. I follow a variation of the techniques shown in this article but one thing I’ve learnt for my own soul, is to NEVER do this on holiday. Holidays are for family enjoyment, so do all of your budgeting before you go on holiday and set yourself X money per day, do not penny count when you’re buying things.

By: Matthew Kirkland

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Understanding Your Current Personal Finance Situation

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:27:43 +0000

It is important: understanding your current personal finance situation is something that every person needs to do. By understanding what is going on with your personal finances you will be able to better control them. This can be one of the best ways to avoid money problems and debt.

Getting started is the hardest part. It can seem almost impossible to figure out where to begin when tackling finance issues. The best place to start is to simply look at expenses and income.

As the staples of a good budget, something every person should have, expenses and income are the main financial issues a person needs to understand. To begin you should gather all the relevant information. You may want to get bills, pay stubs and anything else that could help you list out your expenses and income.

The first thing to do is to track your daily expenses. This includes eating out, shopping and gasoline. You want to include these on your expenses list. You may need to gather receipts or actually keep a log for a week to be able to come up with an accurate account of your daily expenses.

Write out a list of expenses and then write out your list of income. At this point you should concern yourself with ensuring everything is listed. If your expenses or income vary then try to get a good average. You should have expenses separated into daily expenses and monthly expenses so you can see where your money is really going. Plus this will help when you go to budget your money.

Now you can begin to look at your debt. You should make out a list of your creditors. Your list should include the creditors contact information, the balance of your debt and the interest rate.

Now you should look at your personal finance accounts. This includes things like checking, savings and stocks. You want to list them all, including their current value or balance.

After going through your expenses, income, debt and personal finance accounts you should have a fairly good idea of where your personal finance matters stand. This should be a great platform for you to build upon to get your personal finances in good order. From this information you should be able to create a budget, get debt under control and best manage your personal finance accounts. You should be able to get the big picture about your personal finance situation and to understand it completely.

By: Joseph Then

The Essential Contents of Finance Metrics

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:40:08 +0000

Managing money is not always about cost cutting. It requires analytical approaches that will indicate which part of the expenses should be minimized or totally eradicated. As such, there has to be measurements in managing money; and in terms of report, this is translated into what is called finance metrics. One cannot just simply decide that a certain process or machine be removed as it is expensive. Decisions based on assumptions are more likely to cause financial damage than assistance or resolution.

There are many aspects in managing finance. There are several Key Performance Indicators or KPIs that need to be incorporated in the report when finances are measured. One of these is job costing. Whenever there are projects that has cost, especially for manufacturing, a job costing analysis should be made. It is in this principle or light that a job costing report should be prepared so the managers will get a picture of what is transpiring. This way, they can also see if the investment is earning or if there is much potential for expansion.

Job costing shows people the total accumulated costs of a certain project, and this should include overhead expenses, too. Full costs are calculated against the revenue, and this is more often than not measured by department or division.

The first part of the job costing report is the job ledger. This should contain accounting transactions in a specific order. Normally, this contains job orders and job numbers categorized in a specific way for easy tracking. This contains revenues, costs, indirect costs, and receipts for all the jobs done for a specific project. The job ledger may be sub-categorized in different buckets to easily identify the pain areas in expenses and lost revenues. This may include current cost, purged job cost, billing cost, and invoice ledgers.

Another metric that can be used in analyzing financial status and movement is discounted cash flow. This is a method in appraising a company and its financial assets. Perhaps the downside of this approach is that it is based on the estimation of future cash out flow instead of current expenditures. However, this estimation is backed up by historical data, which is the foundation of any statistical study. Normally, discounted cash flow is only applied in investments and real estate development industries. However, its effectiveness in gaging financial performance has led it to become one of the most used tools in financial studies.

Discounted cash flow may be confusing to some. The problem is that this is not based on simple addition and subtraction. There are a lot of financial formulas that need to be used because one has to factor in the value of treasury notes and the span of time that has elapsed since the assets were purchased.

In general, people who want to manage their finances should consult an expert in finance management, whether this is personal or corporate finance. It is always best to consult experts when developing finance metrics, to be sure that the things being measured are ultimately aligned with the goals of the company.

By: Sam Miller